Our main focus should always be on jobs

Rep. Richard Hudson

February 27, 2014

I’ve had a great week touring local businesses and meeting with community leaders and constituents. I live here and commute to Washington because I understand how important it is to be connected to our community. I even had the chance to stop by the grand opening of Concord’s Sea Life Aquarium, an attraction that has created jobs in our district, expanded what is already the largest tourist attraction in N.C., and strengthened our local economy. It was great to have the opportunity to meet with some of our entrepreneurs and small business owners to see firsthand the challenges and prospects our job-creators are facing.

As your Representative, my top three priorities are jobs, jobs, and jobs. My main focus on this tour was to gain a better understanding of how Washington’s policies are affecting the economic growth and future outlook of the manufacturing community. I had the opportunity to visit some of our most promising local businesses to discuss ideas that will encourage expansion and hiring. I am so impressed by the work going on at all of the facilities I visited and the positive impact each one has on our local economies. Unfortunately, these businesses struggle as they are forced to comply with more rules, more paperwork and more red tape coming out of Washington.

The Obama Administration has continuously relied upon executive power to pass nearly 300 economically significant regulations, putting the burden on our economy and job creators and pocketing more of American families’ hard-earned money. I’m working to put an end to these job-killing regulations. Last session, the House passed dozens of pro-growth jobs bills like the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act (H.R. 367), which will require any rule or regulation with an economic impact of $100 million or more to come before Congress for a vote before taking effect. The REINS Act will prevent our bloated bureaucracy from crushing our small businesses with unnecessary costs and allow them to grow, expand and hire people.

During my jobs tour, I also heard the need for more efficient workforce training programs and more high-skilled workers. Every year, $18 billion of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars are spent on job-training programs, but only a fraction of workers receive and complete the training necessary to get jobs. In fact, nearly 50 percent of the people who go through the federal job training programs don’t complete the program with the needed skills. That failure rate is unacceptable.

The House passed the Supporting Knowledge and Investing in Lifelong Skills (SKILLS) Act (H.R. 803) which will improve the way our job-training programs work. The SKILLS Act consolidates and streamlines more than 30 separate federally funded workforce development programs and protects taxpayer dollars by requiring an independent evaluation of each training program every five years. The best part of the SKILLS Act is that it empowers our job-seekers and gives more control to local communities.

Unfortunately, both of these common-sense proposals continue to collect dust on Harry Reid’s desk. I came to Washington to fight for people, not bureaucrats and politicians. I know that the hard-working men and women who spend each day honing their craft and producing for the local economy understand the needs of their industry better than the folks in Washington. I’ve got a plan to create jobs, and it starts with getting government off the backs of our job-creators and returning power to American workers and entrepreneurs. See my plan and tell me what you think at Hudson.House.Gov/JOBS. It’s past time for the Senate and the president to work with Republicans to find common ground and put people back to work.